Re: [Tlf-devel] US Field Day & VHF

[Steve Huston]

On Monday, Jul 5, 2004, at 02:23 US/Eastern, Steve Huston wrote:
> I see a couple messages were just posted about adding VHF to this very 
> fine program to aid in US Field Day operations.  I'd like to second 
> that idea, and if I have time to go through the source I might submit 
> a patch against 0.9.19 for it (looked through, and it doesn't seem too 
> difficult to change, but I didn't look too hard either :> )

Well, I've looked through, and hacked a bit.  So far, I have added 
partial capabilities for 6m, 2m, 440, 1200 and 2400.  One can change 
bands and log contacts there, but they're not yet properly displayed on 
the scoreboard right now (dupe checking seems to work fine).  As you 
scroll through the bands, 6m and 2m are displayed as such, and since 
there's already room for three characters the others are shown as .70, 
.23 and .13.

A few things I want to get right before submitting a patch:

1) Proper scoreboard updates - I'm thinking how it works with the WARC 
bands, when you hit 6m it would rotate out the HF bands and rotate in 
the bands 50MHz and up.

2) A flag for the rules that turns on/off HF and VHF, so you can have 
it do HF only, VHF only, or both.  Would default HF to on and VHF to 
off, unless in qso mode when all would be on.

A couple questions I'd like to know from the users:

1) Should I look to add a 'FM' mode?  I'm completely new to contesting, 
I would imagine that for contacts there isn't much distinction between 
SSB and FM, but if there's a call for it I'll see what I can do.

2) Since the scoreboard currently holds 6 bands, and I have 5 bands 
added, which would be a good 6th to put in the mix?  220?  900?  Both, 
and take 2.4GHz or 1.2GHz out?  Add both and figure something else out 
for displaying them?

I hope to have a working patch by the end of the week, and when I've 
got something that "works for me" and compiles I'll send it in for 
scrutiny.  I also noticed in the comments that "NBANDS" was defined, 
but the comment said that the number 9 was still hardcoded in many 
places; in adding other bands, I think I found them all :>

--
Steve Huston - W2SRH - Unix Sysadmin, Dept. of Astrophysical Sciences
 Princeton University  |     ICBM Address: 40.346525   -74.651285
   126 Peyton Hall     |"On my ship, the Rocinante, wheeling through
 Princeton, NJ   08544 | the galaxies; headed for the heart of Cygnus,
   (609) 258-7375      | headlong into mystery."  -Rush, 'Cygnus X-1'